Cabbages & Kings: Hacked off

“Two wrongs don’t make a right Experiment with three!” From The Shaitannama by Bachchoo

As an elder of the Asian community, I am often asked if I am on Facebook. My usual reply is I would be lucky to be on Facelift! By which I mean that I am much too advanced in age and experience to believe that I have thousands of “friends” who are interested in what I ate for breakfast or where I got drunk the previous night. Facebook is a contemporary form of idleness and I have witnessed its being the conduit of anxiety and even enmity, forging ethereal friendships and trading real and imagined slights. Facebook’s interactions go from trivia to paranoia.

So there! That’s done for Facebook! Now about email. The difference is that the latter isn’t necessarily a vanity forum. It’s the way billions of people communicate with each other idly as well as usefully. And the privacy of that communication is assured — or was assured as I found out yesterday when I was informed by my service provider that I had been “hacked”.

My first response was to feel for my arms and legs to see if they were still there. If I had been in, say, a Tartar raid in the Crimean War being hacked would have meant losing a limb to a blow from a scimitar. What the Googler meant was that some miscreant had discovered my password and was sending bizarre messages to all and sundry in my email address book. The Googler advised me to change my password which I immediately did and instead of using my mother’s erstwhile maiden name, I changed my password to “Saaswad” — a village near Pune where I was born. The rhyme is rather neat, n’est ce pas?

Being hacked is like death in several ways. First of all one is convinced that it’s something that happens to other people but if it is to happen to you it’s still a long way off. Of course I have heard of others being “hacked”. I was working on a script with a producer once, sitting across a table from him and sneaking a look at my emails when I received one from the self-same producer. The message said he had journeyed to Sarajevo for an international conference on AIDS and had been robbed of his wallet, money, passport and credit cards and required me as a dear and reliable friend to send £2,000 by bank transfer to an address in Lagos.

Dear reader, as soon as I read that, I knew something was wrong! I knew for instance that this producer has no interest in conferences on AIDS and wouldn’t travel to the Mumbai suburbs for such, far less travelling to Bosnia (I am good at Geography!). Besides, there he was, all 210 pounds of him, sitting opposite me at the table making idiotic criticisms of my screenplay.

His phone began to ring. “No, no,” he said. “Have you gone mad? What Sarajevo? I am working with Dhondy on his wretched script in Mumbai!”
As soon as he rang off, the phone rang again. Same thing. Was he in Sarajevo? I thought I’d better admit that I hadn’t been listening to his nonsensical critique of my superb screenplay but had been fiddling with my emails instead. I showed him his putative message demanding funds after he’d picked up the fourth and fifth phone call. He took in the message and became, understandably, very cross.

He immediately turned his own computer on and went through his address book telling all his friends and acquaintance that he was safe and in Mumbai and not to send any money to Lagos. Those who replied, immediately or after a day or two, unanimously said that they had no intention of sending any money to help him out. Either all of them knew it was a hackers’ scam or it was time my producer friend reassessed the depth of love and respect that he was held in.

When I was hacked yesterday, I began to receive irate phone calls from women of my acquaintance who were not asked for money to be sent to a Nigerian account, but were for some reason sent, in my name, advertisements for slimming pills. “Why are you sending me this rubbish? Are you trying to say I’m fat?” was the tenor of their understandable annoyance. The men who had been contacted by the hackers had been sent advertisements for drugs and procedures which would enlarge their penises. The response from a few of them was: “How did you know? To whom have you been talking?” I had to send out a general disclaimer saying that it was my firm belief that “size didn’t matter” and I had no interest in any aspect of the anatomy of my male or female friends, business associates and acquaintances. (Very embarrassing and not entirely truthful — but that’s what we in the philosophical faculty identify as the risk of generalisation.)

In the case of private individuals such as myself hacking leads to small inconveniences and perhaps to revelations about who loves you. In the case of “celebrities” be they actors, politicians, the corrupt rich or some combination of these, the hackers discover secrets which they can then publish in newspapers. In the last few years in Britain, professional hackers have done just that.

This hacking and the associated crime of phone-tapping were, it now emerges, widely used methods of crooked journalism. The trial of editors and journalists of the Murdoch newspapers for such crimes is even now in progress in the British courts.

The scandal of hacking and intrusion into the lives of citizens has led to a government enquiry and wide debate about the regulation of the press and the great and the good, some of them “celebrity” victims of hacking have formed an association calling for stricter regulation of the media. The association is called “Hacked Off”. I am not a member.